Saturday, September 21, 2013

Junk Mail Reinvented

Hi Everyone,

I am back! Sorry I was on a bit of a hiatus, who ever thought wedding planning would be so much work! Mike and I took on a new project so I thought I would share.

In any given week, we have a minimum of 11 pieces of mail that we don't open. On average, each audit receives 41 pounds of junk mail each year, 44% of which goes straight into the landfill unopened.

That is a whopping 100 million trees. 

So Mike and I set out to stop the trend. First, we contacted our banks, utility providers, etc and moved to a paperless billing system. We set up a separate home email address to house all of the bills in so we weren't mucking up our personal emails and off we went. Epost.ca also offers a paperless billing system in which you can even make payments online as well. We however chose to set up a separate email address because we already have online banking payments set up for all of our utilities payments, it didn't make sense to set up new accounts all over again. 

But that wasn't enough.. we were still getting those coupon books and value packs, life insurance advertisements, etc! So I set out to find a solution.

I found an organization called 41pounds.org. "Saving the earth, 41 pounds at a time." You sign up on their website and list the organizations and companies that are sending you unwanted mail and they contact them on your behalf to remove you from their mailing list. The cost is $35 per household and that covers each person in your household for 5 years. 

We are going to sign up, we are just taking a month's worth of junk mail and gathering it up so we get every organization we no longer want to receive junk mail from off our list. We want to be as thorough as possible. 

Will you be signing up? Let me know what you think. 

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